Palmer Raids

The Palmer Raids was a series of raids conducted by the US Department of Justice against suspected radical leftists (especially anarchists) from November 1919 to January 1919 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The Palmer Raids occurred in the aftermath of an April 1919 series of bombings that targeted Palmer, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and other prominent American officials and businessmen, and they occurred within the context of the First Red Scare. J. Edgar Hoover carried out the first raid on 7 November 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik November Revolution, targeting Russian labor activists. 3,000 people were arrested and 500 were deported, leading to the Department of Labor and several American citizens objecting to the political repression exhibited during the raids. Palmer and all of the agents involved in the raids would be fired due to their illegal detention of several people without crime or trial.